Being a consultant often times means being on the road to various client sites. We stay in hotels throughout the week and try out best to stay connected. Staying connected to our teams is extremely important but its hard to accomplish, especially if your team is a lot of people. For example, lets say you are a team of 5 and you are all spit up to do simultaneous installs at five different locations. But at the same time, you are all trying to work on another project that needs collaboration amongst the group. Usually, a share drive would do that trick but now…you are away from your companies network and getting access may complicate things. Well…now there is an easier solution. In a previous class, we had discussed cloud computing. The following is a specific example. A new website called box.net is solving problems such as the one described above. This solution provides a shared workspace for teams where they can have one copy of each document that is secure and accessible by all members. This allows for version control, making the configuration managers job a little easier. This site can even be used for discussions for traveling teams. Some other cool features are that when a document is downloaded, you are able to see when this was done and by whom, making auditing easier as well. This site allows users to view files using any browser-enabled mobile device and use Box’s apps on the iPhone and Blackberry. Pretty cool. Additionally, when someone makes an update to a group document, you can get an update. It is similar to a news feed for your groups shared workspace. So if you are in a meeting and are wondering when your boss will review a given document so you can deliver it, you will get an update once its complete, making it available for whatever purpose you choose. Access control is well thought-out in the site as you have control over data access and use. It is customizable. And for those of you security minded people, you can set levels of view and edit permissions, times for auto-deleting a file or removing a link, and of course password protect files. The cost of this app is relatively small and training is virtually zero when compared to other methods. Since everything is in the cloud, there is no software and hardware cost and start up time is in minutes!!!
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Lets share...
Being a consultant often times means being on the road to various client sites. We stay in hotels throughout the week and try out best to stay connected. Staying connected to our teams is extremely important but its hard to accomplish, especially if your team is a lot of people. For example, lets say you are a team of 5 and you are all spit up to do simultaneous installs at five different locations. But at the same time, you are all trying to work on another project that needs collaboration amongst the group. Usually, a share drive would do that trick but now…you are away from your companies network and getting access may complicate things. Well…now there is an easier solution. In a previous class, we had discussed cloud computing. The following is a specific example. A new website called box.net is solving problems such as the one described above. This solution provides a shared workspace for teams where they can have one copy of each document that is secure and accessible by all members. This allows for version control, making the configuration managers job a little easier. This site can even be used for discussions for traveling teams. Some other cool features are that when a document is downloaded, you are able to see when this was done and by whom, making auditing easier as well. This site allows users to view files using any browser-enabled mobile device and use Box’s apps on the iPhone and Blackberry. Pretty cool. Additionally, when someone makes an update to a group document, you can get an update. It is similar to a news feed for your groups shared workspace. So if you are in a meeting and are wondering when your boss will review a given document so you can deliver it, you will get an update once its complete, making it available for whatever purpose you choose. Access control is well thought-out in the site as you have control over data access and use. It is customizable. And for those of you security minded people, you can set levels of view and edit permissions, times for auto-deleting a file or removing a link, and of course password protect files. The cost of this app is relatively small and training is virtually zero when compared to other methods. Since everything is in the cloud, there is no software and hardware cost and start up time is in minutes!!!
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Hey, this is Sean from Box.net. We appreciate the post and just want to say that you and your readers should feel free to reach out to us anytime - whether you have general/technical questions or product suggestions, we'd love to hear 'em.
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